The Day That Gave Us Donald Trump

WASHINGTON, D.C.—They were arresting veterans as I walked down Capitol Hill toward Union Station. Seven Iraq veterans had gone to the office of Senator John McCain to protest the nomination of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State on the grounds (basically) that they'd all had too much trouble in their lives because of the insatiable appetite for oil that exists in Tillerson's world and in the customer base that it serves, one SUV at a time. They wouldn't leave. The Capitol Police came and put them all in zip ties and loaded them into a wagon. They would be driven around the block, processed at the Capitol Police headquarters, and released. The cops said the whole thing should take about three hours. The charge, it was said, was disruption.

"Don't sell the United States for oil!" came a disembodied voice from behind the metal cage inside the police wagon. Another Iraq vet, a young man named John, was being trussed and then guided gently into the wagon and then it drove away. That was how the last day of the 43rd presidency of the United States ended, at least for me.

The last time I saw Donald Trump, currently the only president these United States of America have, in the sculpted, replicant flesh was in a place called Lisbon in Maine. It is one of those small, battered places in northern New England, bisected as they all are by a cold, gray river, where the primary industries are long gone—in Lisbon's case, paper mills and the timber industry that once fed trees into them. Lisbon is a town of 9,000 people in Androscoggin County that has been in economic "transition" for decades.

Sarah RiceGetty Images

It used to be a thriving mill town. The Worumbo Mill, for example, was a staple of the community. (It sponsored a successful semi-pro baseball team that employed, among other players, Eddie Waitkus, who made it to the majors and got famous because he was shot by a crazy fan, the incident that inspired Bernard Malamud's novel, The Natural.) The mill remained open until 1987, surviving a fire, a flood, and years of economic dislocation afflicting the surrounding area. Now, Lisbon is a bedroom community for Lewiston and Portland, and the town is thick with an assortment of fundamentalist Christian churches, including the Open Door Baptist Church, the minister of which, David Garnett, had told the crowd the previous evening that a visit from Donald Trump was nothing less than a gift from god.

It already had been a remarkable day in what was rapidly becoming a kind of democratic hallucination of a campaign. When the day began, all of the polls and most of the smart money were saying that Hillary Rodham Clinton was going to sail to a relatively easy victory over one of the flukiest carnival barkers ever to enter American politics. That afternoon, however, in a stunning act of bureaucracy ex machina, FBI director James Comey had announced that he had found a cache of new e-mails connected to Clinton's now-infamous private server.

Alex WongGetty Images

The conservative niche media went into orbit. The mainstream media reacted like seals in the tank at feeding time. The e-mail "scandal," which had been as dead as James Polk for a couple of weeks, suddenly came rolling out of the tomb again and, by the time Trump took the stage in Lisbon, it had been revived as an issue for the rest of the campaign.

I had heard most of the spiel before. In his campaign's unlikely rise, Trump had discovered within himself a gift for apocalyptic political preaching. As I wrote at the time:

His stump speech always has been shot through with apocalyptic themes. Drugs are always flooding the country. ISIS is standing behind you in the convenience store line. The economy is ravaged by "the elites," of whom he's not one any more. We're all just a half-step from selling apples on a steam grate. In this, his rhetoric is not all that far removed from the invocation delivered by Pastor Garnett before his appearance in Lisbon… "Somebody bigger than you and I has put this all together," the pastor said. "I tell you, things are gonna change. We're gonna get our country back!" As a candidate, Trump has discovered within himself a gift for the apocalyptic that he can sell to a very large and nervous part of the country. He is John The Revelator, and his Patmos is a luxury suite in midtown Manhattan, or a mansion in Florida.

So I was rather half-listening to him and half-playing with Tucker, a gigantic Great Dane working as a service dog to a veteran suffering from PTSD. But then Trump rounded into a new peroration. (It might not have been truly new, but I hadn't heard it before that day.) There are few expressions of the apocalyptic vision that do not end in glorified triumph in which all the righteous will share. Up until this point in the campaign, Trump's apocalypse had promised no such ending but, as the evening fell, he brought this long, meandering, and mostly truthless narrative to its inevitable conclusion. He told the folks in Lisbon:

"I'm asking you to dream big, to push for bold change, and to believe in a movement powered by the people and by their love for this country. I have a message for all the doubters in Washington. The future belongs to the dreamers, not to the cynics and the critics …We're fighting to bring all Americans together. We're a divided country, we're going to bring them all together. Just imagine what we can accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one god, under one American flag."

I looked up past Tucker, up into his owner's face, and then past his owner's face to the hundreds of other faces and there I saw something I hadn't seen at any Trump rally in the previous 16 months. I'd seen anger there, surely, edging often toward outright rage. I'd seen frustration, edging often toward outright hatred. I'd seen uncertainty, edging often toward outright terror. I had seen some or all of these things on some or all of the faces at some or all of the rallies. But this was different, the way the end of his speech was different. Donald Trump had stumbled into an actual vision of the Kingdom of Don, where the water flows like crystal, a heaven with only all the top people, the best people. And a white grand piano in the lobby. And, most likely, the angels who sounded the trumpets get stiffed on the bill.

And all the people around me shared this vision and what I saw in their faces was hope—blind, heedless, unmoored hope, too powerful to be easily called vain, hope like lightning over this bruised and nightstruck valley. And, in a wretched campaign that was as dark as the hills beyond, that hope was the last thing I came to despise because I saw the death behind its eyes.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Esquire participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.